What Is Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Many of the couples and families that come to our practice tell us that they’ve already tried skills-based or tools-based therapy. Yet although this approach may have provided some surface solutions, it didn’t allow them to get to the heart of their issues and their relationships didn’t improve to where they wanted them to be.
What they really wanted was a safe space to be honest and vulnerable about their deepest longings and emotions. And EFT, which stands for Emotionally-Focused Therapy, provides that. EFT helps people get to the root of their challenges instead of arguing about who did the dishes, who took out the trash, and other trivial issues.
The goal of this approach is to create enough safety for couples and families to share how they really feel without escalating conflict. Rather than point fingers, EFT teaches them to communicate from a place of empathy and understanding, focusing on their own feelings instead of their partner’s flaws.
Questions About EFT Therapy?
How Effective Is Emotionally Focused Therapy?
EFT is an evidence-based therapy with substantial research supporting its effectiveness. Most studies show that 70 to 75 percent of couples who undergo a full course of EFT report no longer feeling relationship distress for up to two years after therapy.*
What makes EFT so effective? It’s a “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” approach, meaning that it focuses on the underlying emotions and attachment issues causing distress in a relationship. This allows people to go deeper than they can with conventional therapeutic approaches. EFT explores emotions as the primary source of healing, which separates it from other modalities that prioritize cognitive processes and behaviors.
At California Relationship Clinic, we use Emotionally Focused Therapy to help couples, families, and individuals improve their connections. We’ve seen firsthand how it can help couples who are dealing with constant fighting, affairs, parenting issues, cultural differences, and uncertainty about whether to stay together or not. We’ve also witnessed its ability to bring peace and harmony into families managing distress or communication issues.
We’re confident that, no matter what kind of relationship challenges you’re facing, EFT can help you strengthen your connections for the long term.
How Does Emotionally Focused Therapy Work?
The first four sessions of Emotionally Focused Therapy are an assessment where we’ll focus on getting to know you and your partner (or family). We will all meet together in the first session to get everyone’s perspective and form a connection. Then we’ll meet with each of you separately to understand more about your history, family, and current relationship challenges. In the fourth session, we’ll all meet together again and create a clearer outline for the rest of therapy.
The aim of our EFT sessions is to identify the negative cycle that you and your partner get lost in together and understand what’s driving it. We will bring insight into the things you do when you are caught up in your cycle so that we can understand what triggers each of you. Essentially, we’re looking for blind spots—places where it isn’t clear what’s driving behaviors like criticism, nagging, or pulling away.
Once you understand your negative cycle well, you’ll be able to catch yourselves and interrupt it. In other words, you’ll learn to notice when a downward spiral is being triggered before it even starts. At first, your therapist will interrupt your negative cycle as it plays out in sessions. That way, you’ll get to experience what it’s like to have a different outcome to your arguments.
Eventually, the goal is for you to be able to interrupt your negative cycle on your own. We want you to learn to communicate from a secure and loving place, relating to your partner with empathy instead of hostility.
How Can Emotionally Focused Therapy Benefit Your Life?
Ultimately, EFT can help you develop a language for talking about your underlying emotions with your partner so that you can be more easily understood. It can feel incredibly relieving to put words toward the deeper feelings that you’ve never felt safe enough to share—or in some cases, didn’t even realize were there. Having repeated experiences of honest and heartfelt communication in therapy can build a sense of trust that, over time, will leave you feeling more secure in your relationship. With this renewed sense of security, it’s possible to:
- Build high levels of trust and be vulnerable together
- Agree to disagree without it being a problem
- Restore a sense of playfulness and fun to your relationship
- Be able to say no and trust that it won’t start a negative cycle
- Hold each other in high regard and appreciation
By achieving all of these things in our work together, you and your partner can course-correct, get back into a healthy connection with each other, and fall in love all over again.
Experience The Healing Power Of EFT In Your Own Life
At CRC, all of our therapists have advanced training in Emotionally Focused Therapy and continue to study ways to use this modality with different issues that couples and families manage, such as addiction, infidelity, and high conflict. We have all received lots of training and support from experienced EFT supervisors, ensuring that we are able to provide our clients with the best possible counseling services.
If you want to experience the safety and freedom that EFT can bring to your relationship, we encourage you to connect with one of our counselors. To get started, you can use our online scheduler or call 424-274-7745 to book a free 20-minute consultation.
*iceeft.com
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